Both Seagate and Hitachi claim they're the first with a terabyte hard drive. Forget who's first -- who's best?
Seagate and Hitachi have simultaneously flushed out more information on their upcoming competing terabyte hard drives.
Both claim they will be the first.
"We expect to be the first to deliver 1TB hard drives in high volume for global customers," trumpets a faceless Seagate spokesperson.
"Hitachi is leading a new era for hard drives," beams Hitachi's chief marketing chum, Shinjiro Iwata. "The industry's first one-terabyte hard drive represents a milestone that is 50 years in the making," he reckons.
We're pretty sure Hitachi wasn't referring to Seagate, but politics is oh so confusing. Droll, even.
Seagate says its terabyte drives will be available sometime within the first half of this year. Hitachi was doubly optimistic, declaring it'll fire out the first drives during the first quarter.
Luckily, there's a difference between the two drives, so sod who's first. Hitachi's terror-biter stores its data on five platters, inherently using ten pricey read-write heads. On the other hand, Seagate's only uses four platters (so eight read-write heads) to store its feisty terabyte.
With better reliability and less power consumption, it is generally considered Good(TM) if a drive has less platters and resulting heads. Also, they're cheaper to produce, particularly with less heads (one of the most expensive components in a hard drive), but you probably won't see this saving.
 Hitachi's terabyte drive gone naked: If your drive looks like this, don't be aroused. Just be concerned. |
In other news, according to DigiTimes, market researcher iSuppli says 100GB to 160GB is the sweet spot in the PC hard drive storage arena, aged as that may be.
Unsurprisingly, it believes the one terabyte drives will only achieve a three to five percent market share in the PC market over the next five to seven years.
This is no surprise, though, really, because that 3-5 percent simply includes the more niche areas that use high-end hard drives; namely, enthusiasts and consumer electronics.
These are the same groups that first pick up new technologies, such as, oh, the 160GB hard drives when they first hit town.
That said, in terms of raw bang for coin, the Aussie sweet spot is currently 250GB drives, hovering around $.38 per GB, although the 300GBers are beginning to look tasty.
In which case, if you're an enthusiast, you'll save some pocket and gain both performance and reliability by instead building a RAID 5 of said drives.
I'm still waiting for my petabyte drive.